My name is Kieran O’ Connor. I’m sitting naked in front of my computer, five hours in to my forty-sixth birthday, writing this letter to myself.
Later, when my wife Kathy wakes, there will be cards and celebrations. She and the twins will have been shopping for Dad, who is so hard to buy for, and I will be delighted with whatever new object they have decided I ought to desire.
Tonight we’ll have dinner at my parents’ house. It will be a big affair. Mum will have invited all of her friends. My sister, Fiona, and her husband, Brian, will be there, together with their brood of boys. A collection of Murphys (cousins from my mother’s side) will be present—looking like characters from an Irish version of The Sopranos. I often imagine speech bubbles above their heads, with the Italian-English phrases of the Mafia transformed in to Irish-English: “I’ll be making you an offer you’ll not be wanting to refuse, so.” “Is it me you’re looking at now?” It would be funny, were it not so close to the truth; the Murphys have been known to break legs from time to time.
I will survive being the guest of honour by becoming the perfect Irishman myself: “It was good of you to come, Mrs. O’Hara. How is young Damien these days? Can I persuade you ladies to a wee whisky, they’ve been poured already and wouldn’t it be a sin to see them go to waste? You’re looking well, Pat, married life must suit you. It’s been too long, Anthony, you and Joyce must come by the house next Sunday.” It’s cartoon Irish, but no one seems to notice, or else they’ve all lived in England for so long that they can’t tell the difference anymore. Sometimes I think I’m in a Robert Altman movie; we’ve all been given characters and asked to improvise the script around the theme of an Irish celebration.
When we get home, Kathy will shower before she goes to bed, a sure sign that I have one more birthday present to come. She is good at sex, as she is good at so many things. She has magic in her fingers, mischief in her smile and she’s read everything from The Joy of Sex to How to Give Your Husband the Blowjob of His Dreams. I probably won’t even need the little blue pills in order to show my appreciation. If I do, she’ll smile, offer a prayer of thanks to the God of Pharmaceuticals, slide up my chest until she is almost sitting on my face and say, “Now what can we do to pass away the next 30 minutes?” I will smile and keep myself interested by trying to guess, before I take the first lick, what flavour douche she’s used this time.
But all of that is ahead of me. Right now it’s five a.m. and everyone is sleeping except me. I like to sit here, in front of my computer, in the hour before dawn. No one thinks it strange any more, not even me. Habit is a great protector in a marriage. No one questions what is taken for granted. I need less sleep than Kathy does, so it is taken for granted that I will rise before her and spend some time on the Net. Doubtless I am getting on with the novel that will, by virtue of being an instant best seller, free me from the rigours of my working life. Or perhaps I am writing to my many friends around the world. It is true that I do these things, but what I do mostly is masturbate to porn.
The Internet is a wonderful thing. It allows me to view almost any sex act imaginable, and all for free.
I am never impotent when I sit in front of my computer. I start with a comfortably thickened cock, nothing spectacular, just enough to register arousal in the same way that cooking smells can sometimes produce a desire for food that is not hunger, but rather the anticipation of a full belly. I stroke myself slowly, but often, as pictures fill the screen. I keep many windows open at once, skipping from image to image, looking for the one that will snag my attention and quicken my pulse.
Masturbation is my one truly selfish pleasure. I don’t have to think of what anyone else wants or what anyone else would think. There’s just me and whatever it takes to get me off.
This morning I’m looking at a series with a skinny forty-something woman using her mouth on her husband’s balls, cock, and arsehole, and then wanking him into her face while pushing two fingers into his arse. I have a set of Japanese Bukkake and Bondage pics where secretaries are tied, fingered, fucked, and spunked on by lots of different guys. Plus two young girls fucking each other and then letting a grey-haired guy sodomise them. A set of “real amateur” facials—women of different types and ages with come in their mouths and eyes and hair and smiles on their faces. Another set with an innocent looking girl apparently getting drunk and fucking first the bottle and then the men who gave it to her. Then a woman of sixty or so sucking off a boy in his late teens, almost smothering him with her large soft shapeless breasts, and lastly, six Thai whores, none over twenty, servicing some blonde middle-aged European, struggling to maintain their dignity in the face of his crazed grin and oversized cock. It’s a normal sort of morning.
Are you shocked? I am. I think of myself as a nice man, a good husband, a loving father. I also get off on violent degrading porn. For these aren’t the worst, not even close. Some days I need the ones with blood and pain or mock (I hope) rape, or heavy spanking of young girls by men my age, or detailed drawings of impossible punishments meted out on helpless women.
So far I’ve avoided the animals and the children, not because they are illegal, but because I fear that I might find my cock twitching and come rushing out of my balls to dribble down over my fist, and then what would I do with what I’d know about myself? You see, I’m starting to believe that “in masturbation veritas.” This is who I really am. This is where all pretence stops. The rest of my life is a socially acceptable lie.
Today, the picture that finally triggered my release was in a set of “gloryhole” pictures—anonymous cocks push through a hole in the wall and a woman, sometimes tied, sucks and strokes until they come. Only as my come started to dry and matt the hairs on my thighs together did I realise that the kneeling woman in the picture, with the balls in her mouth and the come on her forehead, looked like Kathy in the year we met.
It’s time to clear the computer history files and password-protect this letter. Then a shower to remove the sweat and semen that are the signature of the most honest part of my existence. Then I can greet my family on this momentous day.
Happy Birthday, Kieran O’Connor.
II. INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
I’m in one of those airport hotels that they use to warehouse businessmen who aren’t free to fly home yet. This one is in Brussels, last night’s was in Frankfurt, not that it matters, they all have the same stink: testosterone, boredom, loneliness, and money.
I could go into town to one of the moules and frites cafes by the Grande Place, but I hate the way the buskers call out to you to eat at their restaurant, and I hate being part of the besuited shoals of men who push through the narrow streets, looking for something to make being away from home worthwhile.
So instead, I take a shower, phone Kathy so that she can tell me about her day, eat my room service meal while watching CNN, and then wait to fall asleep. Two hours later I give up waiting.
I can’t face the novel that I’ve brought, and I hate buying pay-per-view porn—it makes me feel inadequate—so I let my fingers form a practised O around my cock, roll the foreskin gently backwards and forwards, close my eyes, and allow my subconscious to choose the object of my desire.
The hair comes first, long thick auburn hair that made a tent around my head when she bent forward to kiss me. Then a wide mouth, given to smiling, but most remembered for the softness of its touch. Finally the breasts: large, smooth, heavy, topped with stubby nipples that darkened visibly when I bit them. She would sit astride me, sucking at my tongue until I was breathless, and then she would force her breasts into my mouth almost fucking me with them. At the time, my darkest secret was that I wanted to suck milk out of those breasts, wanted to feel it squirt, warm and wet, into my mouth, wanted to suckle and nuzzle and bite and gobble and never stop.
Her name was Eilleen Clark.
I lick my lips, push my cock up though my fist, and let myself remember her.
In my last year at school, Eilleen Clark looked beyond my glasses and my awkwardness and decided that I was worth exploring for a while. She was my first girlfriend, my first kiss, my first fuck, my first realisation that, after awhile, sex with someone you don’t like very much leaves you feeling angry and needy at the same time.
Eilleen was a wet-dream experience. She always wanted sex, even on her period, and she always wanted to go further. I was her sexual protégé, someone she could initiate, someone her parents would mistakenly trust not to fuck her. Eilleen was turned on by risk and power. I was turned on by the whole idea that someone wanted to fuck me. We used each other with a thoughtless ease that only the young or the very jaded can achieve.
The first time I came in her mouth, before she’d let me fuck her, we were in the back of her dad’s car. He’d picked us up at the end of a hike in the Peak District and was driving us the hour or so home. It was dark. Eilleen pretended to go to sleep with her head on my lap. I put a coat over her so that I could play with her breasts. Eilleen’s parents were tolerant of a little petting, and beside I was a good Catholic boy they could trust.
Eilleen’s dad was talking to me as he drove. Radio 4 was playing in the background. Eilleen was biting me through my jeans, getting me hard as I twisted her nipples and talked to her dad. She often bit me to get me hard. Afterwards she would usually wank me off, using her hand or her breasts. She was proud of her breasts, and had told me that rubbing my sperm into them always made her feel wicked. It always made me feel unreal and exhausted. This time I assumed she was just teasing me, testing my control. I was almost right.
Eilleen undid my zipper slowly, to hide the noise. I wanted to look down, to stop her, to watch her, but her dad had just asked me a question about the route of our hike. I answered him as Eilleen pulled out my cock, rolled back the foreskin, and rested it against her smooth cheek. I could smell my arousal and worried that the scent would fill the car in seconds.
Eilleen solved the problem by sucking me into her mouth. She’d never done that before. I was surprised by the wet warmth that engulfed me, so much more immediate than my virgin fantasies had suggested.
For a second I was paralysed by my own incredulity. Eilleen had my smelly, sticky cock in her mouth. Any moment now her dad would catch us. My mother would be told. I had to act.
I don’t believe that our decisions shape us. I think they help us to discover our shape. The important ones run deep, bypassing conscious thought and connecting directly to who we are and who we are capable of becoming.
I decided to let what would happen happen, and do what I could to deal with the consequences. I’ve been doing that ever since.
“Are you all right back there?”
Eilleen’s teeth clamped in warning around my shaft.
I twisted her nipple in retaliation and said, quietly, “Eilleen’s sleeping. I don’t want to wake her.”
Eilleen unclamped her teeth and pushed my cock sideways into her cheek, making the sensitive tip quiver with pleasure.
“Looks like you tired her out up in the hills.”
Her dad made eye contact with me in the mirror as he made this casual sounding statement that I knew was a question. He wanted to know if I had fucked his daughter up there in the heather. I smiled at him. “Eilleen tires herself out.”
Her dad looked back at the road.
“We went a long way.” Eilleen’s tongue moved out along my shaft. “Now she just wants to get her head down.”
Catholics are taught that it is possible to sin in thought, word, and deed. I was relishing my hat-trick.
There was silence in the car. I listened to the calming litany of the shipping forecast on the radio, magic names like Dogggerbank and Finnestair, while Eilleen worked on me. She kept her head almost still, apart from the occasional car-induced roll, and used her tongue and her teeth to tease and please. Once she moved a little so that she could slide her hand inside her jeans.
I was going to come soon. I had no idea what I would do or what Eilleen would do then. I decided that she would think of something.
“We’re almost home.” Her father’s words could have been encouragement, a warning, or just chatter. I couldn’t tell from the tone.
Eilleen started to suck. She brought her cunt-slick fingers up to my cock and stroked. Her father kept his eyes on the road. I struggled for silence as the orgasm hit.
I was young and the come was substantial. I kept my eyes on her father, even when my hips rose and my cock drove further into Eilleen’s mouth. She pulled her head back until only the tip of my cock was in her mouth and calmly milked me. Eilleen swallowed everything. It was obviously something that she’d done before.
At the last moment I risked looking down. She popped me out of her mouth like a used straw and grinned at me. Then she yawned, stretched, leant towards her father and said, “Are we home yet, Daddy?” while I struggled to cover myself.
I was dropped off first. Eilleen got out of the car to kiss me good-bye. I could taste myself on her lips. That was why she’d wanted to kiss me, of course.
“Come to the house tomorrow and I’ll fuck you,” she whispered, just before she turned back to the car.
The cold hit me as soon as she moved away. I caught her father looking at me for a fraction of a second before he drove off. He was trying not to know, and it was killing him.
Twenty-eight years later, I still remember that look as clearly as I remember the lava flow of that first mouth-come. In a twisted way they both excite me.
I’ve been working my cock while remembering Eilleen, reaching the point in the wank where I am no longer gentle with myself in thought or deed. My hand grips my cock so hard that the tip bulges above my fist. The movement is not yet rapid, but it makes the headboard bang.
The images in my head flash by. Eilleen giving me a titfuck, crouched behind an air vent on the last ferry home from Liverpool, the smell of diesel heavy in the air. Eilleen fucking me the first time in her parent’s study, pinning me to the floor and riding me, not even locking the door first...me, at the point when we were both bored with each other, insisting on one last fuck and taking her against the wall of that same study, holding one of her legs in the air and pushing desperately into her, while her mother made us tea in the kitchen.
I’d finally called Eilleen’s bluff. I wasn’t the innocent anymore. I’d pushed her into something she didn’t want to do, but was too proud to refuse. She didn’t look at me as I pumped away. She struggled a little when her mother called to us, but I pressed her against the wall one more time and squeezed out a small amount of triumphant sperm.
“Coming, Mum,” she said, as I slid out of her.
She left the room without looking at me. I never went back to her house after that cup of tea.
Sweating on the bed, head thrown back, I struggle to come. It’s no longer something I want, just something that has to happen before I move on. A grunt. A dribble of thin sperm. A twitch or two between palm and tip, and I am lying in my own sweat and semen once more, feeling soiled by my thoughts.
My head is full of ghosts that only honesty can exorcise. These are not things I can share with my wife or my friends, but I know what to do. I open my iBook and write to myself, recording my thoughts and deeds, examining my conscience in the time-honoured way. These letters are my confessor. Peace of mind is the sacrament I seek.
I used to believe that the Church made masturbation a sin because it was fun. Now I wonder whether it was because they knew its power to sap the spirit and stain the soul. It is not the act, of course, but the focus that creates the sin. My subconscious knew what it was doing when it threw Eilleen into my head tonight.
Eilleen Clark introduced me to my wife in the first summer after school. Kathy was newly arrived in town. I had been watching her helplessly, having no idea how to get to know her. Eilleen always noticed these things. She introduced us, and immediately I found I could talk to Kathy. There wasn’t the electric shock of sexual desire, more a recognition of someone who would understand.
Before Eilleen left, she said, “Kathy is an innocent, Kieran, treat her well. I’ve told her all about you.”
I knew what she was offering and what she was threatening. Mentally, I rose from my chair, pulled Eilleen’s head back by that thick auburn hair and bit out her throat. Actually, I said to Kathy, “There is nothing wrong with innocence or experience.” Words have always served me well. I hooked Kathy with them that day, and I made Eilleen watch.
I would like to blame Eilleen for who I am. It would be convenient but not credible. She saw something in me and literally sucked it to the surface. I am someone who can smile and talk and shake hands in the most civilised way, and yet always feel the tug of the undertow of my own lust. I think I was never innocent, just ignorant of some of the possibilities. Kathy, in her way, is still innocent. It is what keeps us together and holds us apart.
I am becoming philosophical, always a sign that I should sleep and not talk.
Goodnight Kieran O’Connor.
III. KISSING KATHY DOYLE
It’s five a.m. and I’m sitting naked in a warm circle of light, focusing intently on the images moving across the screen of my iMac. My libido is howling like an abandoned dog, yet, for once, the slide show that holds my attention contains no porn.
I pause the slideshow on the second run through, trapping on the screen an image that I cannot look away from. It is of a young woman, perched on a desk, leaning forward, both hands gripping the edge of the desk a little too tightly. Her pale skin is smooth and perfect. The sight of it summons up from my hindbrain the smell of fresh cotton sheets and sun-warmed forearms. I run my tongue over my lips, wanting the salt taste of her flesh.
The woman’s lips are just starting to form a smile that has not yet reached her eyes. She has wonderful blue eyes—not the washed-out blue of Scandinavia, but the warm blue of a summer sky—with pupils so dark that they seem to glow. Her eyes speak of passion held in check but fretting at its bonds.
The clothes she is wearing place the picture firmly in the 1970’s: a ballet-wrap top, laced at the waist, caresses her small round breasts; sleeves, split at the shoulder and tied halfway down the biceps, reveal the skin they pretend to hide; a bias-cut skirt that reaches the knee on one side but only makes it only part-way down the thigh on the other, continues the theme of hide-so-they’ll-seek. This is an outfit chosen with care, designed to send only one message: “unwrap me, but do it slowly.”
The woman’s name is Kathy Doyle; she is nineteen years old and still a virgin. I took the picture twenty-seven years ago, the first time she slept in my bed, two years before we had sex, five years before she married me.
Now her name is Kathy O’Connor. She is the mother of my children, my best friend, my wife. For my forty-sixth birthday she digitized the pictures that map our life together and gave them to me on CD. “Something for you to look at when you can’t sleep,” she said, and for the first time I wondered if she knew that when I leave her side in the mornings to “work” on my computer, I litter my screen with porn like a man searching his desk for something he has lost and needs desperately to find.
I remember taking this picture. I sat on the single bed in my campus room and asked her to smile. I was looking up at her, trying to pretend that everything was normal; that this was not the day before the first night she would spend in my arms.
I was also nineteen but not a virgin, at least, not quite. Kathy’s best friend, Eilleen, had taken that particular trophy. Kathy never asked me about what we did or didn’t do, but I’m certain that Eilleen will have told her about my insatiable appetite for her mouth and my willingness to take risks when sexual favours were on offer.
Not an inaccurate description, but one that somehow didn’t apply to Kathy and me. With Eilleen, everything had been about sex. With Kathy, everything was about the nervous excitement of finding somebody who makes you more than you can be alone. There was a strong sexual potential, but it was folded into a strong sense of having discovered someone unique.
After I took the picture, there was a pause. Neither of us knew what to say. So for once I didn’t say anything, I just held out my hand and pulled her to me. Then I kissed her.
Kissing Kathy was always an intense experience back then. She would give herself completely to the kiss: her eyes closed, her mouth welcoming but not demanding, her body molded against mine but immobile, subsidiary to the contact between our mouths.
My fingers would tingle, my nose would fill with her scent, my body would register her soft heat, but my mouth, my mouth became everything: sensitive, greedy, and insatiable. We would kiss and kiss and never have enough of it.
Many times, after an evening of being left discretely alone together in her parents’ parlour, I walked home through the cold darkness glowing with the remembered contact. Her scent would cover me like a promise. My mouth would smile, not in triumph, just at the surprising, irrepressible joy of it all.
We were both good Catholics. Sex outside marriage was sin enough. Pregnancy outside marriage would have been a personal disaster. Kathy didn’t trust the condoms, and had moral objections to the pill, and so we agreed upon restraint. Or at least our minds agreed. Our bodies constantly rebelled.
Behind every kiss there was the knowledge that we could do more; that we could go further. That I had been further already, and so could show her the way.
That knowledge stretched taut between us as I finally led her to my bed. She looked excited and afraid. We both knew that this time a kiss would not be enough.
I entered a kind of trance state, undressing her in silent wonderment.
I wanted...everything.
But I held back. I explored her with my mouth and my fingers. I pressed her thighs together and pushed between them, mimicking the action we both wanted but had chosen to deny ourselves.
Back then I thought I knew what Kathy wanted: tenderness, respect, passion, restraint. I did my best to give them to her.
It took me years to understand that Kathy really wanted was to be led. To be taken. To be absolved of responsibility.
If I could go back to my nineteen-year-old self, I would whisper in his ear, “Take her. Take her slowly. Take her with love. But take her. She will love you for it.”
Kathy still loves me. But we don’t kiss the same way anymore. We kiss for comfort, or for greeting, or for happiness, but never with the astonishment of unlooked for passion.
Now, of course, we can have sex whenever we want, and yet there are still things I won’t do, or daren’t ask for. These things are part of the reason I haunt the porn sites, like a ghost unable to touch what it most desires.
I allow myself one last look at the image of Kathy perched on the edge of my desk, poised to be led into her future, and sigh at how much I see now that was hidden from me then.
Finally, I scroll forward to the last picture on the disc: Kathy as she is now. She is still a handsome woman. Her face is lined more from laughter than from worry. Her hair is cut short into a style that is pragmatic, timeless, and yet still hints at sexual intent. Her eyes have a depth to them that makes it hard to look away. It is a face that would be fearsome in anger and radiant in happiness. Looking at Kathy, you want to make her smile.
I study this image of hers, the last sentence in the coded message she placed on this CD, and I wonder: have I harmed her with my too careful loving? Is it too late for me to take her in my arms and take her to places where we have never been? Perhaps I should go back into her bed now, part her legs, stroke her awake, hold her hands up above her head, and drill her into exhaustion?
But she dislikes sex in the morning. She is too stiff, she says. And the kids will be awake soon. It may even be her period.
Instead, I will switch off the computer and head for the shower. Standing beneath its forceful indifference I will deal with my erection. Then I will bring my wife breakfast in bed.
Sure, you’re a fine husband, Kieran O’Connor.
